One tactic to improve the relevance of your website is to write useful articles on your site’s topic. The implicit goal with this exercise is to garner high-quality inbound links from related websites. However, pursuing those links, depending on your tactics, can skirt search engines’ terms of use. The better approach is to follow search engines’ guidelines to build up on-page, relevant keywords for your business, and bolster them with appropriate meta data.

Key areas to pay attention to:

Appropriate use of headings and subheadings, taking advantage of the relative importance of H1 vs. H2 vs. H3 etc. tags

Text geared toward quickly answering your visitors’ questions

On-page indicators for location-based relevance, if necessary

Meta data regarding topics and keywords that align with the on-page text

As with most standards, those relating to SEO are fluid with each iteration of a search engine’s updates, so it’s important to pay attention to the basics. If you’re in a competitive industry, asking for help from an SEO professional will help hone your targets and goals.

Typically small businesses worry about how to manage their client relationships on a small budget. Especially in these economic times, promotional gewgaws are quickly becoming one expense too many.

Email, however, is as close to free as possible–it’s really only the cost of your time–which makes it the perfect vehicle for deepening contact with dedicated followers. Here are some rules to make sure you don’t shoot yourself in the foot while taking advantage of this tool:

Set specific expectations on frequency of delivery, content, and information privacy at the onset of the email subscription

Follow the guidelines you established in step 1! Otherwise, send out a notice of expected changes, with the option for users to modify their email preferences

Take advantage of any analytics provided by your listserv service to optimize open and response rates

When users stop interacting with your email, confirm via personalized contact whether they are still interested

All of these options should be available from a reputable service provider, like JingTone, should you choose to pursue this relationship-developing tool. A few things to keep in mind:

Most users are already overwhelmed by the amount of traffic their inboxes are seeing; for purely promotional emails, less is more

Beware of key spam black-list words, and avoid their use (for instance, “free” is almost guaranteed to land you in the spam box)